Chapter 11
WILLIAM
William followed the trail of the golf cart.
His body’s response to the figure with the shaved head was primal; he was frightened and at full attention, twitching at any sign of motion, his heartbeat rabbit-quick.
He smoked two cigarettes and told himself he was not tracking down a threat to Shay; he was simply trying to prove the threat did not exist. That it was just a local teenage boy riding in the back, the duffel containing a towel for the beach or a baseball mitt, the innocent fragments of summer.
It was difficult to tell how far he’d walked when he encountered a fork in the road. He did not know which route the golf cart had taken, but he chose to arc toward the water.
On the beach, there were old women hiding in the shade, a gang of children building a sandcastle, carving a moat in the wet sand with their fingers. There was no sign of the figure from the golf cart; the only person he recognized was Shay’s friend from college, Joel.
William had met Joel at his father’s funeral, though he’d felt like he already knew him.
That spring, Shay had spoken of Joel in a way she never spoke of anyone, and in the church, some of his girl cousins whispered about how handsome Joel was, their mothers hushing them because you didn’t talk about boys at a funeral.
William liked Joel immediately. He somehow made himself feel present but not intrusive.
Shay turned her head when he entered, and they acknowledged each other without saying a word, an obvious love rushing between them.
Or maybe it was only obvious to William.
Joel introduced himself outside the men’s room, and they talked about Bowie because Shay had told Joel how much William loved The Man Who Sold the World, William rambling about B-sides and synthesizers.
Joel did not tell him how sorry he was or how awful it was that his father had died; he only asked if he needed anything.
That formed his sense of Joel in an instant: he would be there for whatever was needed.
Shay rarely spoke of him after that summer for reasons William never understood, but it comforted William to see him now. He felt his stomach muscles unclench. Perhaps it was a sign—that instead of some imagined danger, he’d found someone who would never hurt his sister.
On the beach, Joel was hunched over a stack of paper, a pen in his hand.
A pretty young woman with black hair lay beside him on her stomach, her face tilted toward him with an expression of adoration.
She reached out, trailing her fingers along his knee, but Joel was so absorbed in his work that he did not appear to sense her touch.
The moment felt intimate, like something William should not have seen, and so he turned away from the shore before anyone took note of him. In the distance, all he could see was a verdant guard of trees.
Back at the hotel, William found Scott, Vivian, and Oscar, smoking and drinking Schlitz barefoot on the porch as if they were lounging in their own homes.
“How long have you been out here?” William asked, after refusing a can of his own.
“Since noon. Scott needed a drink the second he woke up. I mean it. He opened his eyes and said, ‘I need a drink,’ ” Oscar said.
“I had weird dreams.” Scott crossed his arms.
“What were they about? I’ll interpret them for you,” Vivian said.
Though she spent her days memorizing bones and ventricles, rationalizing the body’s miracles, Vivian was something of a mystic.
She wore a pendant of black tourmaline for protection, gave William sage to burn in his bedroom when he told her he couldn’t sleep, left polished quartz beneath patients’ cots when no one was looking.
And the next day, the gout was gone. Her toe was half the size, she would tell him.
But for all of this, she still ate hot dogs and went through a can of Hidden Magic hair spray every week. He loved her for these contradictions.
“I dreamt about jellyfish,” Scott said.
“Like you were stung by one?” Oscar asked.
Scott studied his hands, embarrassed. It was still a surprise to William, to see the missing thumb and pointer finger.
He never forgot how lucky he was to have the draft end right as he turned eighteen.
Shay’s friends were able to avoid it with college deferments, but a few men from the restaurant had served, and it had obviously changed them, to have survived such horrors, only to return home and be told it was all for nothing.
“No, like I was one,” Scott said. “I was in the ocean, surrounded by a whole bunch of them.”
“That sounds kind of . . . peaceful,” William said.
“It sounds boring,” Oscar said.
“Shut up, Oscar,” Vivian said. “I think it means you want to feel protected. That you want to be with your family, and that you have the ability to harm those who want to harm them.”
“Or it could mean we saw jellyfish when we got off the ferry,” Oscar said.
“We did,” Scott admitted.
“Well, both of those things can be true,” Vivian said.
Vivian’s words reminded William of the figure riding in the golf cart.
If he felt his family was threatened, would he be capable of protecting them?
As a boy, he’d been in one fight, if he could call it that—Tim Walters had punched him in the ear after he’d made the cataclysmic error of picking up a soccer ball with his hands in gym class, and he’d curled up like a pill bug, cradling his skull.
But that was not a question he needed to answer.
He was emotional, exhausted, seeing things that could not exist; in the airport, he’d thought Aunt Eleanor had been waiting by the gate.
His mother had been the first one to tell him about Synanon.
Your sister’s in some sort of group therapy, she had said one Sunday last December when he was over for dinner, a rare event, though they lived in the same city.
His mother had solitary rhythms, even when they’d all lived under the same roof.
She shared little more than what she was reading or how her colleagues at the dance studio annoyed her.
William sometimes wondered, if she had been born a few decades later, whether she would have even had children.
The day before, Shay had called her to apologize for not speaking at their father’s funeral.
She told me she was very angry then, and that she doesn’t want to be angry anymore.
William was surprised. Shay and their mother were two pieces of flint sparking against each other.
Shay offering her an apology seemed absurd.
But by this time, the engagement party had come and gone, and William and Shay were no longer speaking to each other.
The next day, there was a grease fire in the kitchen, a vicious tear of flames that threatened to consume everything until Alejandro remembered the extinguisher, charging at the blaze like he was going into battle.
It was all anyone could talk about, and then the next day came with its buzz of alarm clocks and sweeps of rain, and the next and the next.
Synanon was forgotten until a month later, when William saw the article with those men and women in overalls, and he realized why the name of the organization was so familiar.
He should have done more. He should have done anything.
Aunt Eleanor told him to call his sister, but he was still angry at Shay, and his mother said he shouldn’t be concerned.
Synanon was no different than est, no more dangerous than the writer Peter Tompkins telling people to talk to their plants or the psychologist Arthur Janov encouraging patients to lie on the floor and scream.
It was therapy, and wasn’t that what all the young people were doing these days?
Endlessly talking about themselves? She did not know Shay had already dropped out of law school, that Synanon was changing, becoming more insular and militant.
That within a few weeks, Shay would be living in their building on Riverside.
Why hadn’t he asked more questions? Before their father died, he’d called Shay every week when she was at college.
Her voice slowed his heartbeat. But especially when she graduated and moved in with Andrew, he was often too self-conscious to call, imagining Andrew listening in from the living room, and she phoned him less and less, which hurt him more than he could admit.
They had drifted apart, and he did not know how to make his way back to her.
It was as if he were in a rowboat with no oars, the dock barely in sight.
And then there was the fracture of the engagement party.
“Are you all right, William?” Vivian asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “I think I’m going to go lie down. I’ve been out in the sun too much.”
“Water with mint,” she advised. “Or coriander, if they have it.”
“Okay.” He smiled, and retreated inside the hotel’s quiet hum.